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Blueshift Customer Stories: Carparts.com Increases Customer Engagement by 400% by Personalizing Experiences

Blueshift

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Carparts.com and Blueshift logos over a red SUV

We all have our (healthy) obsessions — some people dote after their pets, others spend a lifetime perfecting their knitting. And as our hobbies became more accessible through digital transformation, many auto part retailers remained rooted in the past, and getting the right parts and instructions to maintain and service vehicles continued to be a hassle. CarParts.com sought to change that and help everyday drivers get back on the road by making it simple to find the right parts, accessories, and vehicle information. Everyone from folks just looking to make a simple repair to lifelong auto DIYers can effortlessly find exactly what they need on CarParts.com.

The CarParts.com team wanted to deliver more tailored, unique experiences, but they soon realized their legacy marketing cloud couldn’t keep up with evolving consumer demands for personalization. The marketing team wanted to move beyond simple batch-and-blast campaigns, but that wasn’t going to happen without a change in technology. To get anything off the ground, the team required significant IT and engineering resources, which stretched out launch timelines and made trying anything new difficult. In addition, their legacy marketing system couldn’t even begin to process the large amounts of historical, real-time, and catalog data CarParts.com was collecting.

Carparts.com’s team had begun to shelve more and more of their great ideas surrounding personalization, and it became clear that they needed a new technology partner. It was essential that the platform they selected could make the most of both their customer and product data. Their previous solution had trouble processing their 1 million+ SKUs, which made personalizing users experience according to their vehicle make/model and unique needs virtually impossible. To pull off unifying both catalog and behavioral data CarParts.com selected Blueshift as their top martech partner for success.

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REINVIGORATE CARPARTS.COM’S MARKETING THROUGH DYNAMIC, PERSONALIZED EXPERIENCES

As more and more consumers shifted to buying their auto parts online and CarParts.com expanded their customer base, their partnership with Blueshift became essential. Blueshift’s ability to autonomously personalize customer experiences without the need for IT involvement was paramount in enabling CarPart.com’s to scale up 1:1 recommendations across channels. This was made possible by unifying and activating all of their existing first-party data, as all while staying compliant with strict privacy regulations with Blueshift’s Single Customer Views.

With Blueshift on-board, the CarParts.com team set out to transform its marketing program with a few key initiatives. Firstly, deliver relevant product and content recommendations to each user based on their vehicle’s year, make, and model as well as affinities and recent behaviors. Then, improve customer engagement and retention by precisely targeting users with meaningful and trusted content at each stage of the customer lifecycle. Lastly, CarParts.com set out to scale message volumes with automated, behavior-triggered campaigns so they can deliver timely, relevant messages based on the latest user activities without relying on engineering resources.

RESULTS AND NEXT STEPS

With Blueshift’s marketer-accessible and flexible platform, the CarParts.com team was up and running quickly. Their team was able to introduce a number of new promotional, transactional, and lifecycle vehicle maintenance campaigns that are fully automated and event-triggered. This included cart abandonment, viewed products, category abandonment, vehicle maintenance, search abandonment, and post-purchase upsell campaigns.

“Blueshift’s platform flexibility addresses our complex data structure and makes it simple to deliver personalized messages and grow our channels. The people behind Blueshift really care about our success and are one of the main reasons we’re at where we are today,” said Houman Akhavan, Chief Marketing Officer at CarParts.com.

With the power of Blueshift, the CarParts.com team has seen incredible results. Click thru rates have increased by over 400% since implementing Blueshift. The team has increased message volume by 130%, with the same amount of resources. And, this hasn’t been due to the team clocking in extra hours as the marketing staff saves over 50 hours a week by eliminating engineering dependencies with Blueshift.

Also essential to their success was aide from our partner, Alchemy Worx. Here’s what Isaac Esses, Senior Strategist at Alchemy Worx, has to say about CarParts.com’s success, “CarParts.com came to Alchemy Worx with a strong email program but needed help taking it to the next level. We brought our reiterative test and learn culture to their channel, optimized conversion through micro-segmentation, and added new automated flows. Blueshift then became the natural choice to support building out data-driven segmentation and keep their personalized flows going.”

This is just the beginning for CarParts.com and Blueshift. The team is already looking to scale up personalized recommendations within their email and SMS campaigns, as well as bringing the power of 1:1 content to their website, advertisements, and more.

Want to read the full story? Read the complete digital CarParts.com case study here.